Join a collective of developers, designers, researchers, artists, occupiers, and hackers to discover new ways of relating to the Occupy movement through analysis and visualization.

Following the success of nationally-coordinated OccupyData Hackathons in November and March, a group of New-York-based Occupy Data hackers will be creating a space for for more days of planning, discussion and implementation. The data sets from previous OccupyData and OccupyResearch events will be available, as well as some new results from an original (as-yet-unpublished) Occupy Wall Street survey.

Occupy Data is a subgroup of Occupy Research, with the aim of analyzing and visualizing datasets related to the Occupy movement. At previous hackathons, teams of people worked on separate projects, with the goal of using free and open source tools to creatively present data pertinent to the Occupy movement and the issues it has raised. Read more about previous projects, get inspired about what you might like to work on here.

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“Open source: an apology”. Although the organizing group is deeply committed to free and open-source software, we will be making use of corporate-owned services such as WordPress, Google Docs and Dropbox. If you would prefer not to use any of these services for political or security reasons, please get in touch with info@occupydatanyc.org

Mean hue of May Day / General Strike Posters compared to Other OWS Posters plotted over hue spectrum [click for full image]

Occuprint.org collects and distributes posters inspired by Occupy movements all around the world. For the May 18/19th hackathon, our group looked at Occuprint’s collection of almost 400 posters. Our main aim was to explore possible relations between image properties such as brightness, saturation, and hue, and intent or purpose of a poster. There were several broad categories that we used to for classification. On the visualization below, the y-axis indicates the brightness of the images by the categories on the x-axis that represent the poster types. In order from left to right:

financial inequality

May Day

strike/labor issues

occupying a geographic space

misc

occupying an idea/concept

Using a collation of Occuprint thumbnails, we first extracted the image properties to create a set of comparable measurements. Then, we used ImagePlot to project the posters by category. Plotting such measures as mean saturation by mean brightness made for visually appealing aggregations, but deriving meaning from many of them seemed a stretch. For this reason, we categorized the images to see if content correlated with image properties.

Brightness distribution of 334 posters uploaded to Occuprint

Overall, our most colorful and brightest category was May Day inspired artwork that did not mention strike. Although strike posters appear to have a high proportion of low brightness images, tow of them, Striking Kites and Strike Arrows, were especially bright. Lastly, we made a few photo montages using the collection (just for fun). This one to the right is sorted by mean saturation. Our next steps for this project will be to more carefully assign poster labels. Due to time constraints, the names were used to inform the labels. However, labels are not mutually exclusive and viewing the actual poster would help to increase the confidence of out labels and likely help assign many of the images that appear in `misc’ to a more accurate assignment.

Other image property explorations

Median Hue (x) by Median Saturdation (y) of Occupy Posters produced in Brooklyn, New York, Washington, Oakland, and Los Angeles. These are the top five locations producing posters for the Occupy movement self-identified in the OccuPrint database. Many Brooklynites prefer to identify their work as produced in Brooklyn rather than New York City.

Hue distribution of Occupy Posters by Women, Men, Crowds, Animals, and Objects [click for full viz]

May Day X strike X Occupy space

]]>https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/is-the-occupy-movement-getting-more-colorful/feed/1ImageJ=1.45pmujalifah145imgs-mayday-v-others_x-huestdbrightnessXcategoryImageJ=1.45pocc_posters_x-mH_y-mS_keycities400imgs-obj-w-m-a-c-huemn-thumbOccupy space X Strike X May DayConnecting Occupyhttps://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/connecting-occupy/
https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/connecting-occupy/#commentsSat, 19 May 2012 21:37:29 +0000http://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/?p=348]]>This project uses data from the Occupy Wall Street Project List (Issue 2, April-May 2012) to map connections between the Occupy movement and other organizations. The data for this small study comes from the project descriptions, which often include lists of partners.

Using the open-source network analysis tool Gephi, we can examine these connections in various displays. These graphs provide an abstract spatial sense of how groups are related, as well as the activity and flow across this structure. By coding partners by type, we can also see how certain types of groups (e.g., NYCGA working groups) are connected with other types (e.g., unions, religious/spiritual organizations, political parties).

Figure 1. Project partners in a force-directed network graph. Each group is represented as a node connected to other groups (nodes) through a project (line/edge). Some nodes are bridge nodes, connecting different parts of the network. In some of the tighter clusters, organizations (nodes) are close to each other because they partner with each other on the same projects. Some nodes (esp. yellow NYCGA nodes) are prominent in the sense that they have connections to many other nodes.

Figure 2. Project partners in a force-directed network graph (curved lines). Each group is represented as a node connected to other groups (nodes) through a project (line/edge). Groups cluster together when they partner on the same project (e.g. groups working primarily on “Health Care for the 99%” are largely clustered at the right of this graph; yoga, wellness, and spiritual groups are clustered at the bottom right). As groups partner with multiple projects, they are pulled away from the cluster surrounding any one project, and pushed toward the center of the graph (e.g., the OWS Arts & Culture working group near the center of this graph has partnered with many different projects).

Figure 3. Project partners in a radial graph with edges colored by target node type. This graph shows that most connections terminate in a wide variety of groups, including larger Occupy movement (red), political (green), religious/spiritual (blue) and union (purple) groups—and especially the latter three given how few of these groups are included in the overall dataset. Since the partnerships contained in the project list are neutral with respect to order (A with B = B with A), this graph does not show the direction of activity per se, merely the prominence of the various types of organizations that are connected by common projects.

Additional data sets—this “parternship” framework could be extended to other datasets, including event planning and endorsements

Geospatial data—a number of these groups focus on specific locations or neighborhoods, and a geospatial layout would show the way in which this network structure operates over physical space

Temporal data—by adding other issues of the project list or timestamped data, we could observe this network grow and change over time

]]>https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/connecting-occupy/feed/1*projectlist-network_categorized_bytargetowsresearchprojectlist-network_categorized_straight_-projectlist-network_categorized_bw_proportional*projectlist-network_categorized_bytargetOccupy Video as Data presentation at NYU, 4/18https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/occupy-video-as-data-nyu/
https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/occupy-video-as-data-nyu/#respondWed, 25 Apr 2012 16:14:15 +0000http://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/?p=311Topics in Visual Culture: Politics of Visual Display" class at NYU: among other things, we talked about our Video as Data project.]]>Last week, a few Data Occupiers went to NYU to present to the “Topics in Visual Culture: Politics of Visual Display” class at NYU: among other things, we talked about our Video as Data project, providing a case study of the data, methodology and political challenges involved in an activism-orientated data representation project.

The slides from the talk are available online — use the arrow keys or the navigation controls in the bottom-right to move between slides, or press the space bar to enter the overview and navigate more quickly.

Occupy Our Data: visualising a movement through social media

Part One: research goals

Occupy is, to the delight of some and the frustration of others, a movement largely characterised by the social media response. By the time of the Zuccotti Park eviction in November, Occupy was being mentioned over a quarter of a million times a day on Twitter, and it’s in a league of its own in terms of tweeted-about social movements in the English-speaking world. Regardless of what the actual relationship is between Occupy (the movement) and #Occupy (the hashtag), it’s obvious that a signficant amount of discussion is taking place online, and in public. But what’s the importance of these conversations to us as activists and academics?

Firstly, relationships between different social media actors can identify key subjects for interview in research, and give some kind of “fingerprint” of the media response to an event. This gives us a starting point for comparing and contrasting the coverage of multiple events. We can also use this kind of relationship-based approach to analyse the relationship between social and traditional media in driving forward the narrative of an event, answering the question of which followed which. There is already some work in this area, for instance the Numeroteca newspaper front page / Twitter mash up (see slide), but we can go further with this: a good understanding of how media have interacted with each other in the past is useful for concocting future media strategy.

Secondly, Occupy is largely un-planned and de-centralised: a consequence of this is that there is no central point of record. Of course, a central record is not without problems, but it does leave us relying on autonomous action to write the (a?) history of the movement. The traditional format for distributed record-keeping has largely been academic publishing (for the moment leaving aside mainstream media, because of the profit incentive, and grassroots blogging, because of its relative incompleteness), but there are some limitations even here. Books and even journal papers take a while to publish, and once they exist, there’s no obvious pathway for that work to enter the public domain. It should hopefully be clear that it’s not appropriate to rely on copyrighted, immutable, and sometimes opaque analysis for the narrative record of our movement. So, setting the parameters of our solution of choice, we want a forum to edit shared knowledge collaboratively, accurately and fairly — intuitively, this is starting to sound like the goals of the Wikimedia foundation (the group behind Wikipedia) and, encouragingly, the first link in a search for “Occupy timeline” is the Wikipedia “Timeline of Occupy Wall Street” page. Clicking on the page, however, reveals a small pile of fairly unstructured information: it’s obviously not a comprehensive timeline of events (or even major events), it’s hovering on the brink of deletion as Wikipedia editors lock horns over whether the page should even exist and the whole thing is out-of-date, to boot. The question of why Wikipedia’s answer is so limited merits a whole talk by iself, but one factor is certainly Wikipedia’s hard rule on citation: no “original research”, no blogs, mainly media articles and academic papers. There are valid reasons for these restrictions, but they do have a chilling effect.

So, what about another solution? Occupy has been around for months, and there’s a wealth of talent and energy associated with the movement: surely some enterprising person has started work on a shared history of an important social movement? It turns out that, with one caveat, the answer to this is “no”. Existing Occupy-related web projects seem mainly geared towards organising General Assemblies, facilitating the ongoing functions of working groups and communicating about actions; in short, goals that serve the movement’s future and present, but not its past. Apparently we are all too busy to take notes… The New York-based Activist Archivists group (and the somehow-related Occupy Archives Working Group) are doing amazing things with digital and physical record-keeping, but it’s too large a job for one team, and their mission is maintaining the artefacts of the movement, not necessarily the narrative of events linking them.

The consequence of these limitations and gaps is that it’s far too easy to make deliberate or accidental over-sights, whether the subject is an academic, an activist (attempting to plan future actions) or a journalist. Occupy has enough of a communications problem already without having to engage in serious head-scratching every time we need to refer to the past. Thus, another project goal is to provide a platform for a collaborative shared history of Occupy, using key public “media objects” to build up a rich timeline.

In summary, there are three main things we’re trying to do:

Access & analyse the vast online presence of the Occupy movement. Interfacing with social media in this way is not a new problem, but it’s not yet one that has an obvious solution (particularly for our needs)

Try and draw some conclusions about relationships and causality from this data.

Use media objects as a baseline to start work on a shared history.

Part Two: data problems

There are several challenges with the data — we haven’t (yet) had to deal with serious data-cleaning, but there are plenty of other things to worry about, primarily:

Huge data volume. OK, it’s not DNA sequencing, but 13,000 tweets in 24 hours is still a lot (particularly given that’s only for one hash-tag).

Limited metadata available

YouTube is important to us (and getting YouTube data was the original motivation for this project): the Occupy Research Demographic and Political Participation Survey revealed it to be the most-used social media platform behind Facebook (which is almost impossible to scrape). YouTube certainly collects excellent data, including views over time, but much of that is only available to the video uploader, and yet more is only available via the website (not the API).

Similar situation with live-streams; sites like Ustream and Bambuser do have “archive” sections, but there’s no motivation for them to make those records complete or useful; their value proposition for users is live broadcasting.

Aside: unsurprisingly, when you turn to companies to provide a public service, they fall short. Eventually the profit motive is going to cause a company’s interests to conflict with the needs of activist users of its services, whether that comes in the form of Facebook-style rolling over for law enforcement, live-streaming services’ poor facilities to keep records or even an entire business model changing, as is the case with Twitter. It’s obvious that they’ve decided that the path to monetization lies in advertising, and for that to be effective they need control over the applications used to interact with the service: this means closing and limiting their API, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. In 2012, Twitter’s search feature goes back 9 days — this is technologically embarassing, but it’s not a technically-driven decision. All of this means that we need to rely on third-party services (we use Topsy), but they have their own conflicts of interest, and in any case it’s presumably only a matter of time before Twitter decides to assert authority over that kind of service, too. Whilst we still can (without losing huge chunks of our history) we should be moving to services specifically tooled for our needs, and not subject to the whims of some profit-seeking entity.

In addition to there being a general scale problem (see above), there’s also a relative scale problem. YouTube is the most-used network by participant (see above), but Twitter obviously dwarfs it in terms of the volume of output. How can we account for this uneven scale in our graphic?

Traditional wisdom: either treat tweets as more important than they usually are (narratives, like Storify) or as less important (aggregation / quantization, like the aforementioned newspaper front page visualisation). Rendering tweets textually is basically just the Twitter interface again (which obviously doesn’t scale to the numbers we need), and reducing them to their volume takes away our ability to show relationships, or drop back down to the underlying tweets.

Can’t we have the cake and eat it too? We can handle a lot of data with the right interface; we want to see volume and be able to follow conversations / drill down to particularly influential tweets.

Part Three: the tool

Before anything else, please note: our tool is still under heavy development; some kind of pre-pre-alpha. That said, we’ve started as we mean to continue and the code is already open source, on GitHub.

The general idea is to make something that’s part timeline, part node-link tree: a visualisation that can show relationships over time (because “relationships over time” is impact).

Currently we’re working on a prototype, trying to create a social media narrative of the Zuccotti park eviction and building the tools as we go. We’re automatically fetching YouTube videos and comments, uploading curated spreadsheets of mainstream media articles and fetching tweets featuring links to any of these resources. Importing bulk Twitter data also works (not shown in screenshot).

Obvious in the screenshot are several rough edges; timezones, management interface, etc.; this leads well into the question of “What next?”.

Finishing prototype development.

Research questions, starting with “what was the pattern of media coverage around the Zuccotti park eviction, and how can we use that information going forward?”

Long-term, we need to work out how on earth we can use this technology to help tell the story of Occupy, and we need to be fantastically carefuly about the position “we” are in whilst doing so.

Part Four: hierarchy online

In short, the internet magnifies the challenges in creating an anti-hierarchical organising process. The usual bodge is to keep the group small, and rely on friend networks to keep the group consistent. This approach doesn’t really work on the internet, though: people expect better, and this invitation system doesn’t scale anyway: there’s no more trust between someone 100 degrees of separation from you, and a complete stranger.

A fundamental problem with the internet is that — even assuming everyone is being pleasant and personable — there is already a huge power imbalance along gender, language and economic lines (see a talk I gave on this last year for more). Occupy already struggles to create a reputation as a representative movement: how can this situation improve if all communication channels are dominated by people already in positions of relative power? We can mitigate some of these issues: multiple language support (planned) and excellent accessibility (OK, working on it). Some of the challenge is out of scope, at least in the short term. But what about the rest? What can we do to prevent another Wikipedia-like hierarchy of white male nerds?

And speaking of Wikipedia, unfortunately people are not always pleasant and personable online. Beyond the archetypal acts of “random vandalism”, Wikipedia suffers from a few common problems: personal disputes are transplanted from the outside world and enacted through the editing interface, activists from both sides of issues attempt to re-write articles to fit their point of view and, crucially, an entire industry of parasi PR consultants has sprung up to leverage Wikipedia to massage truth online. The project deals with these issues through a supposedly meritocratic culture; you are respected based on your contribution and ability. The drawback of this sysxtem is that you’re not just being judged on contribution, you’re being assessed on your apititude for some pretty technical writing skills, and your conformance to the Netrual Point of View, which is anything but.

So it’s an open question. How can we possibly devise a system that at once allows anyone to contribute, and attempts to challenge existing hierarchies in society? In short, how can we prevent Wall Street paying some intern to damage or pervert our shared history? We don’t yet know, but these are vitally important conversations that we need to start now, and continue in a permanent revolution of anti-hierarchy.

I was fascinated when, in mid October, occupiers erected a tent city (against the instructions of park owner Brookfield Office Properties). The very form of the spatial occupation had transformed; an official public space had become an unofficial private space.

Initially, crowds of discussants created a place akin to the the Greek “agora”.

However, after the construction of the tents this “agora” began to look more like a squatter city.

The importance of this transition lies in the difference between official public and unofficial private. A speaking square, much like the public square form that existed in Zuccotti before it was tented, represents a true public democratic forum. One where people can speak their mind and (ideally) represent themselves on even ground. All space, with exception to some OWS administrative spaces (kitchen, medical tent, media center), were open for people to be in, prior to the parks tenting.

However, with the construction of the tents, this official public space became an unofficial private space with ad hoc residential streets and private encampments; in some cases people got to be very possessive about their space.

The public forum gave way to private cul-de-sacs of tents, “do not enter” dead ends, and guarded/ exclusive fabric bounded constructions– whether or not it is valid, the tent city was undeniably the genesis of Bloomberg’s OWS safety and sanitation concerns.

I was very interested in mapping the dense networks of public thoroughfares and private residences in Zuccotti. My first thought was to use some sort of GPS technology so I went on the app store and searched “GPS tracker”, “Walk Watch” was one of the first free options.

When you turn the app on it prompts you with a simple start/ stop watch. When you click start you commence a GPS recording device that creates a blue dotted line every place you go– My mapping effort consisted of walking around the Zuccotti park with the GPS locator on. I attempted to walk through every accessible thoroughfare, and by doing this establish a line map of places that were ok to be (official public) and places that were closed off (unofficial private).

The GPS was far less reliable that I hoped it would be. It worked far better on far bike rides than it did on accurately depicting micro-routes in a 1 block radius park. Regardless, it does convey the complex and segmented nature of the new “unofficial private” space. I believe I addressed every possible pathway through the park and the entire walk took 32 minutes and covered 1.2 miles.

]]>https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/using-a-free-jogging-app-to-gps-map-unofficial-private-space-in-zuccotti-park-ows/feed/06583995897obrett11ImageImageImageImageImagecitizen data sets and twitter bot guards of public spacehttps://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/citizen-data-sets-and-twitter-bot-guards-of-public-space/
https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/citizen-data-sets-and-twitter-bot-guards-of-public-space/#respondMon, 26 Mar 2012 12:31:28 +0000http://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/?p=260]]>Robots have been firm supporters of the Occupy movement, taking up protest signs where human arms grew weary. Mechanical automation does not need to be the exclusive domain of the physical. Indeed, drawing attention to those public spaces that activist automatons occupied last year is really a job for online automation.

Introducing @OccupyPOPS, a Twitter bot that coordinates weekly mini-occupy movements at a different privately owned public space in New York City. Privately owned public space (POPS) is a city program that grants property developers increased density in exchange for publicly accessible outdoor and indoor spaces. In 2007 the City recognized the failures of the program and went about improving it with new regulations. The intended outcome of these changes was the increase of daytime public use of these spaces.

In September, Occupy Wall Street created the opposite problem when it mobilized a protest movement in Brookefield Properties’ Zuccoti Park. Suddenly the under-utilization problem of a privately owned public space became a problem of over-occupation. But how well are these spaces used? Where are they? And how can political discourse become a normal and acceptable activity within these spaces?

data from nycopendata

Readily available data on these spaces offer conflicting pictures of the spaces. According the City’s publicly available dataset on POPS there are just under 400 locations, but Bloomberg media says there are 500. Although City standards outline a variety of requirements that include the number of trees, seats, and contact information that are meant to be posted in these spaces, all these requirements are missing from the publicly available dataset.

OccupyPOPS seeks to draw more humans to privately-owned public spaces and to add public information about these space – combining automated social media methods with collaborative database development and Open Data sources. The automated twitter account algorithmically selects a location for the next Occupy movement from the City’s published dataset of POPS (see fig 1.). Throughout the week leading up to a mini-Occupy, the bot running the twitter account sends out messages reminding and encouraging followers to arrive at a particular time on the given date.

fig 1, most icons from thenounproject.com

In addition to automatically coordinating the event, the twitter bot broadcasts public information about the space – identifying where there are gaps and the need for people to help improve available information. The @occupyPOPS bot monitors Foursquare and Twitter for check-ins at addresses where a POPS is located. The bot sends the user a tweet letting them know that they are are at or near a privately-owned public space and following up with a request to help fill in some of the details missing from the public dataset. Most of the details that the bot would request the user to verify include specifications outlined by the City. The bot may also ask the user to offer their perception of the public space, a tally of the people currently in it, whether it appears suitable for Occupy, and if they have an idea on how it may be improved.

fig 2, most icons from thenounproject.com

By drawing upon and cleaning the City’s dataset, OccupyPOPS makes each mini Occupy movement a method of increasing the usage of these spaces, mobilizing public participation in the regulation of these spaces, and in improving publicly available data.

possible outcomes of a collaborative citizen dataset on public space

The particular tactic in this project is the assembling of a networked public on a public space and for the improvement of urban conditions. “In considering the social sustainability of our cities,” says Mirjam Struppek in Urban Screens, “we need to look closer at the ‘liveability’ and environmental conditions of public space; if people are to be encouraged to appropriate public space, new supportive strategies are needed in which they can take on the role of pro-active citizens, not just law-abiding consumers.” Improving and having a hand in the shaping of public spaces requires pro-active citizens and citizen groups to engage opposing actors (the City, property owners) by interfacing and challenging their information support systems with a citizen dataset. A significant aspect of the debate over the Occupy movement’s access to Zuccotti Park was over usage and equitable access to the public space. What data did Occupy have to support their position? In the wake of the Occupy movement, property developers will try to demand revisions to the POPS program. What data can be used to challenge that attempt?

Developing and maintaining a citizen’s dataset that is aggregated from government sourced Open Data and refined through citizen annotations, additions, transformation, and information architecture opens up potential fields for action not limited to the normalized expectations and the operationalized requirements that have emerged from the contest between City and property owners over public space. “The database evokes an architectural process that emphasizes intense attention,” says Jesse Shapins in Urban Database Documentary. The robots can help maintain the attention to public space that Occupy started.

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Visualization of locations of privately-owned public spaces generated in Processing using the Unfolding library, Cloudmade map #55356, and the Privately-Owned Public Spaces dataset available on NYC Open Data.

]]>https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/citizen-data-sets-and-twitter-bot-guards-of-public-space/feed/0Screen Shot 2012-03-26 at 8.00.15 AMmujalifahcm-cityevaluationcm-POPSlocationscm-occupyPOPS-automobilizecm-occupyPOPS-autorefinecm-occupyPOPS-outcomesvisualization: bankruptcy books at the Seattle Public Libraryhttps://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/visualization-popularity-of-bankruptcy-books-at-the-seattle-public-library/
https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/visualization-popularity-of-bankruptcy-books-at-the-seattle-public-library/#respondMon, 26 Mar 2012 11:55:02 +0000http://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/?p=244]]>Matthew Willise is a Design and Technology MA student at the New School University. While he was unfortunately not in town to join us for the OccupyData Hackathon he did share this excellent visualization that he produced of bankruptcy related book titles checked-out from the Seattle Public Library from 2005 through 2010.

As Matthew describes it: “Between 2005 and 2010, use of the Seattle Public Library and guide books on personal law and bankruptcy reflect the financial instability and crisis throughout the United States.”

More details on this visualization including Matthew’s research question, analysis outcomes, and processing sourcecode are available on his blog.

]]>https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/visualization-popularity-of-bankruptcy-books-at-the-seattle-public-library/feed/0seattle-keep-propertymujalifahseattle-2005seattle-2006seattle-2007seattle-2008seattle-2009seattle-2010seattle-how-to-fileseattle-keep-propertyseattle-keyseattle-new-bankruptcyseattle-solve-troublesseattle-timeout-sonarmarch 31: ows archive dayhttps://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/march-31-ows-archive-day/
https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/march-31-ows-archive-day/#respondSun, 25 Mar 2012 00:02:26 +0000http://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/?p=123]]>We will be showcasing some of our outcomes from the OccupyData Hackathon in NYC and outcomes from groups around the country at OWS Archive Day this weekend at Eyebeam. Please join us!

In preparation for OWS Archive Day, we will reconvene at the Aronson Gallery to review progress on our visualization projects, consolidate documentation of our work together, and to review options for further collaboration. Time for our meet-up is at 11am in the Aronson Gallery, 66 5th Ave, New York.

]]>https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/march-31-ows-archive-day/feed/0Screen Shot 2012-03-24 at 7.50.24 PMmujalifahThemes and Quotes drawn from responses to “What are you trying to achieve with your participation in the Occupy Movement?”https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/themes-and-quotes-drawn-from-responses-to-what-are-you-trying-to-achieve-with-your-participation-in-the-occupy-movement/
https://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/themes-and-quotes-drawn-from-responses-to-what-are-you-trying-to-achieve-with-your-participation-in-the-occupy-movement/#respondSat, 24 Mar 2012 23:08:43 +0000http://occupydatanyc.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/themes-and-quotes-drawn-from-responses-to-what-are-you-trying-to-achieve-with-your-participation-in-the-occupy-movement/]]>Initial sketch of the themes that emerge from “Q42. What are you trying to achieve with your participation in the Occupy Movement?”

Our first attempt to develop categories of framing themes follows below. The themes are listed in bold and representative quotes follow below. This is data analysis the old fashioned way– what makes a lasting impression after reading through hundreds or thousands of responses to this question?

restore dignity, change, a better future, a better world, hope

Build a movement to restore dignity to the human experience and empower working people to create the world we want.

justice, fairness, solidarity,

Engaged communities openly discussing problems and solutions, working together constructively, focussed locally but connecting nationally/globally too. A more equal world. A society that works for everyone

the american way

To bring America back to the republic our founding fathers intended

A better grasp on what true freedom is to the American People, to bring real meaning to the phrase “”Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Government of the people, for the people and by the people with liberty and justice for all

Bring about a shift in humanity’s consciousness from egocentric to universal.

Evolution of consciousness to realize we all share this fragile globe — respect.

Educating the general public, informing them that they can have an effect on the world around them and to stop complacency

accountibility, corruption, inequality, money out of politics,

Overturning 30 years of trickle up economics.

Inform people about the corruption and help to get the money out of government.

Impress upon those watching the importance of accountability for those who’ve broken the law and equal opportunity for hard working, unselfish individuals

democracy versus corporatocracy, improving democracy

I would like to see some major changes in this country. Make it a democracy again, rather than oligarchy.

I want to help make “”democracy”” REALLY mean what it is supposed to stand for, and not merely a futile exercise in choosing between brands of sock-puppets that have been bought and paid for by the rich for the benefit of the rich.

To replace the existing illegitimate corporatocracy with a direct participatory democracy based on social and economic equality.